


a long way from shore

by oopshidaisy, ViolaWay



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene, Multi, Open Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 15:42:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14139207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oopshidaisy/pseuds/oopshidaisy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolaWay/pseuds/ViolaWay
Summary: She doesn’t know whether everything Maya told her was a lie. But when she thinks of Maya, she doesn’t think of the worst of her.





	a long way from shore

**Author's Note:**

> submitted this for a uni assignment and actually got a decent grade so go figure! the marker mentioned that it seemed like i care about the characters a lot and i was like ".....ah yes......i care.....a normal amount, about iron man....."

“ _Before he built rockets for the Nazis, the idealistic Werner von Braun dreamed of space travel—he star-gazed. Do you know what he said when the first V2 hit London? ‘The rocket performed perfectly…it just landed on the wrong planet.’ See we all begin wide-eyed, pure science. And then the ego steps in, the obsession. And you look up, you’re a long way from shore._ ” —Maya Hansen, to Pepper Potts

 

Things could, so easily, have gone differently.

When Pepper finds out that Maya’s dead, weeks after the dust has settled and the Extremis virus has been purged from her body, she’s shocked by the intensity of her grief. It feels like it’s choking her, a weight settling into her throat. She’d only known Maya for a few days, but it had felt like—more. Something had shifted within Pepper, making space for another person, and now that space was empty, a hole that threatened to close in on itself like a collapsing star. A black hole.

Tony only mentions it in passing. If she didn’t know him better, she’d think him unaffected, the way he slips it into an unrelated conversation and hurtles onwards without a pause, talking about a plan he and Rhodey have to eradicate AIM’s remaining tendrils once and for all. But the tightening at the edges of his mouth tells her more than he ever would, out loud. It tells her that his heart is broken, too.

They don’t discuss it further.

Later Pepper finds herself locked in their en-suite bathroom, curled in on herself on the pristine tiles, clenching her teeth against tears. Every time she shuts her eyes she sees the way Maya bit her lip after she laughed, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear and ducked her head after receiving a compliment. She closes her eyes tight enough, and she sees the way Maya looked the last time Pepper saw her, apologetic and vulnerable and frustrated all at once.

She hears Tony’s voice, asking her if she’s alright. He’s been even more protective since her kidnapping, attentive in a way that goes against his very nature—and she appreciates it. But right now she knows that if she opens her mouth the only sound she’ll make is a sob, so she stays silent.

*

Everyone assumes it was Tony who stipulated that their relationship be an open one, but they’re wrong. It had gone something like this, after their first kiss on the rooftop.

“You should probably know,” Pepper said, “I’ve been sleeping with Natalie.”

Tony looked dumbfounded for a total of two seconds before he recovered. “Her real name’s Natasha, and she’s a spy for SHIELD.”

“Right. Weirdly, still not the craziest thing to happen tonight.”

Tony flashed her that smile, the one that crinkled at the corners of his eyes and turned his brown eyes molten. “It’s cool. We’ll make it work.” He paused, taking a moment to survey the burning wreckage of the city. “I’ll, you know, do my best and then somehow fuck up anyway, but—I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy,” Pepper said, and kissed him again.

*

The protective urge was displacement, pure and simple. Tony was missing after the Mandarin attack—Pepper refused to believe he was dead—and the only person it was within her power to protect was Maya.

As they were driving away, Pepper’s hands trembling against the steering wheel, Maya reached over to enclose her wrist, wrapping nimble botanist’s fingers around Pepper’s hammering pulse. “He’s alive,” Maya said.

Pepper laughed, and the sound grated against her own ears. “Believe me, it’d take more than that to kill Tony Stark.”

*

Pepper wonders if there was a funeral. Maya hadn’t mentioned any family, and her life had been too consumed by her work to let anyone else get close. It explained why she couldn’t get out of AIM when things started turning bad. There was nowhere to go, nothing but her research and her life’s work being used to destabilise the entire world.

She asks, “I need you to tell me how she died,” while Tony’s underneath a car in his workshop, because she can’t bear to look at his face when he tells her. It’s a coward’s way out, and she regrets it when she hears him bang his head on the underside of the Roadster.

“He shot her,” he says, through a groan of pain. “Killian. She was trying to save m—us. The world. She finally realised that, uh, she’d let it go too far. She was so close to the breakthrough she wanted that she just—stopped seeing the bigger picture.”

“I’ve known a few scientists like that.”

“Mm, we’re a tricky bunch. But we…get there in the end. It was—” He rolls out from under the car, finally looks her in the eye. “Killian showed us what the Extremis was doing to you. It was just supposed to rile me up, you know, get a reaction. But…I think that was what made her see. What she’d created, to _heal_ people, it was hurting them. Hurting _you_. And she changed her mind.”

Pepper can feel herself coming untethered, tears dancing jerkily across her vision. “What happened to her body?” she asks.

*

They only shared one kiss. If Pepper closes her eyes, though, she can still feel the phantom pressure of Maya’s lips against hers, the smile forming as she drew away. It was in the hotel room, before Pepper had been dragged out kicking and screaming with Killian’s hand around her neck.

“Want to raid the mini-bar?” Maya suggested, grabbing two whiskey glasses from a cabinet.

“One drink,” Pepper said. “Then we should get some sleep.”

Maya checked her watch. “Oh, hey, it’s Christmas Eve already.”

“Any Christmas presents this year?”

“Nothing that comes close to your giant bunny.”

Pepper laughed. “That’s the thing about Tony, when he loves someone,” she said. “He’s so excessive, so extravagant, but he just gets the _worst gifts_. I think he just gets all in his head about it. So Rhodey gets a suit of genuine medieval armour, all because Tony can’t just say _I love you_.”

Maya grinned, flopping down onto the double bed with her glass of whiskey cradled in both hands. “Most years I just end up buying myself one of those desk Christmas trees and working through the day.”

“That’s…”

“It sucks, I know. But I’m used to it.”

“Well, I can’t get you any massive stuffed toys, but—”

Before she could overthink it, Pepper leaned forwards and pressed her lips to Maya’s, hesitant and gentle until Maya pulled her closer with a hand in her hair. When they broke apart, Pepper breathed, “Merry Christmas,” and touched her tingling lips with a finger.

Maya’s smile was breathtaking.

*

“I don’t know,” Tony’s saying, and Pepper’s trying to hear past the ringing in her ears. “I don’t—I didn’t go back for her body. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

Tony sighs, and the slashes of purple beneath his eyes are as bad as they’ve ever been. There’s been no recovery from the events of New York, or from anything that’s happened afterwards. Much as Tony wants to pretend he’s been miraculously cured by the removal of the arc reactor, she sees the tremors in his left hand and hears his panicked breathing when a nightmare assaults him late at night. She wants to tell him that just because there’s no longer shrapnel headed inexorably towards his heart doesn’t mean the scars are gone. She just doesn’t know how.

She says, “I know I didn’t know her for very long, but…”

“You loved her.” He laughs, although it’s more of an outtake of breath than anything. “It’s alright, she had that effect on people.”

“I don’t know how to stop.”

*

The last time Pepper saw Maya was when she betrayed her. Maya described her as an ‘incentive’, something to be used to manipulate Tony, and yet her eyes hadn’t been on Killian. They’d been trained on Pepper’s, silently begging for forgiveness.

Pepper still doesn’t know whether it was Maya who told Killian where they were hiding, or whether he found them on his own. She doesn’t know whether everything Maya told her was a lie. But when she thinks of Maya, she doesn’t think of the worst of her. She thinks about the woman who lit up every time she discussed science, so thrilled by its possibilities. She thinks of the woman who told her about charting constellations as a child, believing that she could one day be among them. _I wanted to be an astronaut right up until I tasted the food_ , she’d laughed.

 _You still could_ , Pepper said.

And Maya had smiled, saying, _No. No, this is it for me_.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u so much to gemma, who may have an ao3 account i don't know about, for helping me edit this and not yelling at me when i refused to remove any of the metal imagery ("because...he's iron man! get it?")
> 
> main twitter: [@davidfinchher](https://twitter.com/davidfinchher)  
> tumblr: [@lesbian-dennis](http://lesbian-dennis.tumblr.com)  
> letterboxd: [@davidfinchher](https://letterboxd.com/davidfinchher)  
> ko-fi: [@elliehopes](https://ko-fi.com/elliehopes)


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